Now Assist is ServiceNow's AI layer built on a combination of their own LLMs and third-party models. Since Washington DC, it has been available in most ITSM-licensed instances. Since Xanadu, it's production-recommended. This guide covers what to actually implement, in what order, and what to expect.
Activate Before You Configure
Now Assist requires the Now Assist SKU (license) and activation of the Now Assist for ITSM plugin. Before doing anything else, verify:
- Now Assist license is active on your account
- Plugin com.glide.now_assist is installed
- The Now Assist admin role is assigned to the right people
Navigate to Now Assist > Administration > Now Assist Settings to see what's active. If the plugin is installed but features are greyed out, the license needs to be activated by your account team.
The Features Worth Implementing First
1. Incident Summarisation
The highest ROI feature in Now Assist. When an agent opens an incident, Now Assist generates a plain-English summary of the record and its related activities. Agents spend 40-60 seconds reading context on every incident — summarisation brings that to under 10 seconds on long incidents.
Enable in: Now Assist > ITSM > Incident Summarisation
No configuration required — it works out of the box on incident records. The summary updates as the incident changes.
2. AI Search
Replaces keyword search with semantic search across your knowledge base. Users can type a question in plain English and get relevant articles, rather than having to guess which keywords to use.
Enable in: Search > AI Search > Configuration
Requires your knowledge base to be indexed. Initial indexing takes 2-4 hours for large knowledge bases. Quality of results depends entirely on the quality of your knowledge articles — poorly written articles produce poor AI search results.
3. Resolution Notes Generation
Generates a draft resolution note based on the incident's work notes and resolution actions. Saves agents 2-5 minutes per incident and improves resolution note quality and consistency.
Features to Approach Carefully
AI Case Summarisation for High-Volume Tables
On instances with thousands of open incidents, AI summarisation can increase database load. Monitor your instance performance metrics after enabling — if you see degradation, configure summarisation to trigger on-demand rather than automatically.
Now Assist in Flow Designer
The natural language flow generation is impressive in demos but requires careful governance in production. Generated flows need thorough review before deployment. Establish a review process before enabling this for your development team.
Data Considerations
Now Assist sends record data to ServiceNow's AI infrastructure for processing. Review your data residency requirements before enabling — if your instance has regulatory constraints on where data can be processed, you need to confirm Now Assist's processing locations are compliant.
Now Assist does not train on your data for other customers' instances. Your data is used to generate responses for your instance only and is not retained for model training.
Measuring Success
Set baseline metrics before enabling Now Assist so you can measure actual impact:
- Average time to first response on incidents
- Average time to resolution
- Knowledge article deflection rate
- Agent satisfaction scores
Measure the same metrics 30 and 90 days after enabling. Without a baseline, you cannot demonstrate ROI to stakeholders.
Honest Expectations
Now Assist is genuinely useful, but it is not magic. Set these expectations with your stakeholders:
- Summarisation accuracy depends on the quality of work notes — if agents write poor work notes, summaries will be poor
- AI Search quality improves over time as your knowledge base improves — it is not a substitute for a well-maintained KB
- Change management is needed — agents need training on how to interpret and verify AI-generated content
- Some features require substantial data to provide useful outputs — a knowledge base with 20 articles will not produce good search results